The Count of Eleven (7 page)

There would be other house-hunters, and just now he was home if they called. For the first two days, however, whenever the phone rang or he dreamed that it did, he felt too watery to crawl out of bed. He lay in a dream which drifted in and out of sleep, and when he was closest to waking he played with numbers in his head. The value of Jack Orchard was eleven: if you numbered each letter with its position in the alphabet, their sum was ninety-two, and nine and two added up to eleven; what else did? “Videos’ and “Bidston’ and “Laura Julia’. Julia had never quite understood his eagerness to add her name to Laura’s, but she’d been touched and had given in to him. He’d thought it might bring Laura luck, that was all; it wasn’t as though he let numerology make his choices for him, the way his parents had let it make theirs, though he had to admit that surprisingly often it had seemed to work in their favour. Sometimes he thought that his father had only been humouring Jack’s mother that he’d juggled numbers until they came out right, though Jack had never been able to see how he did it. When Jack had been as old as Laura his father had teased his brain with mathematical puzzles, and as he lay in bed they came back to him. Twelve metal balls look identical, but one of them is either heavier or lighter than any of the others; using scales to weigh the balls against one another, how do you determine which is the odd one out and whether it is heavier or lighter in just three weighings? “Balls,” Jack mumbled eventually and dozed, feeling childlike, safe in bed and eager for tomorrow.

Wednesday brought a phone call from a couple who wanted to view the house, and Thursday brought the couple themselves. The woman kept sniffing at a lingering trace of the smell of the damp course, and Jack found himself emitting sniffs as if in sympathy, which caused her husband to scowl as though Jack were mimicking her. Jack refrained from pointing out that they both smelled so pungently of what must be a pack of dogs that even his clogged nose noticed. Given the noncommittal mutterings with which they took their leave of him he couldn’t regard the day as having been especially productive. At least on Friday he felt well enough to drive to Liverpool.

Once he was out of the tunnel under the river he headed south on the dock road. The shipping offices of the Pier Head gave way to warehouses, blocks of which had acquired new identities: boutiques, restaurants, purveyors of Liverpudlian nostalgia, a Tate Gallery, yuppie apartments. Further up from the river the warehouses were unimproved, and there were few people in the largely windowless streets. An old Chinese couple whose resolute toothless ness seemed designed to aid their grimacing hobbled uphill towards Chinatown, and a girl of about Laura’s age wheeled a pram, the contents of which Jack couldn’t distinguish, across his path as he steered the van into the entrance to a court of warehouses. Buildings like secrecy embodied in forty-foot walls of red brick surrounded him at once, cutting off the mumble of the city and grudgingly returning him an echo of the slam of his door as he stepped down.

Apart from the van, the only vehicle parked in the court was an uncabbed lorry trailer at least as capacious as the Orchards’ house. Most of the stout doors in the hefty walls were unidentified by signs, but a slightly askew bright-red plaque was screwed above the wicket in the’ door nearest the van. V1CS VIDS, the plaque announced in white letters, most of which belonged to the same font. Above the plaque a camera which had recently been assailed with litter swivelled rustily to watch Jack, and in front of the wicket a dog began to growl.

If it hadn’t, he might almost have taken it for a carpet which someone had dumped. As he pressed the bell push next to the door, the animal pricked up one threadbare ear and the chewed remains of the other, and bared teeth so eroded that the sight made Jack’s teeth ache. It looked as though an Alsatian and several other breeds, all of them ready to fight, had been involved in its birth. The dog was continuing to growl, keeping it low in order to prolong the threat without drawing breath, when the grille above the bell push cleared itself of a gob of static and said “Give it a kick.”

Jack leaned one hand on the door frame and pirouetting gingerly, delivered a kick to the wicket above the old rope of the dog’s tail. The door didn’t budge, but the dog raised its head from between its paws and began to foam at the mouth while its growl doubled in vehemence. “Not the door, you fool,” the grille protested, ‘the dog.”

“Kick your own dog,” Jack said, almost falling on top of the animal in his haste to back out of reach.

The grille expelled a burst of static like a hiss of reproof, and Jack was awaiting a more positive response when the wicket crashed open and the dog leapt up, straight at him. He froze, telling himself not to show fear, and at the last moment the dog swerved and fled into the road, causing a Jaguar driven by a huge Jamaican to screech and veer. “I wouldn’t have stood in his way, la,” the pony-tailed youth who had opened the door advised Jack. “He’s not our dog.”

“I felt lucky,” Jack said like the kind of film he thought the youth might watch.

The youth, who wore an earring and a T-shirt printed with a hero as muscular as he himself was scrawny, seemed unimpressed. “Whir you from?”

“Over the water,” Jack said, wondering why this provoked a stare which bordered on the hostile. “My business, you mean? Fine Films.”

“Never heard of them.”

“That’s some admission,” Jack said, and when the stare didn’t waver: “You sent me a catalogue.”

“We sent lots this month,” the youth said accusingly. He craned back through the wicket and shouted “Says he’s Fine Films.”

“Let him in,” a woman responded.

The youth shrugged and ducked through the wicket. “Gorra be curful,” he muttered, which apparently implied a request, because Jack had scarcely crossed the threshold when the youth said as if he was repeating it “Shut the door.”

Jack did so, and looked around. Beneath the brick ceiling, metal shelves standing a foot taller than he were attached to the bare brick walls; others stood back to back on the brick floor, leaving just enough space for two people to pass in the aisles. Unsurprisingly, the enormous room smelled of brick. One entire wall was of Horror, while the opposite wall displayed second-hand cassettes, growing cheaper and dustier as they progressed towards the dimmest corner of the room. Jack collected a supermarket trolley from beside the cash-desk, behind which a perspiring pudgy woman who looked as if she might be the youth’s mother was using a hand-held device to stick price tags onto cassette boxes, and headed for the ex-rental cassettes. Even here Horror seemed to be the norm; more than half the boxes offered screaming women. “Why do people want this sort of thing?” he wondered aloud.

The woman threw an armful of priced boxes into a trolley for the youth to distribute on the shelves. “Worse than that is happening to someone somewhere in the world right now.”

Jack couldn’t tell whether she intended that as an explanation or a defence. “I wasn’t attacking you personally.”

‘1 should hope not,” she said loudly to the youth.

Perhaps Jack should be guided by the critics. He began to look for boxes which quoted reviews of the films. He hadn’t realised there were so many magazines; he’d never heard of at least half of them. He tried reading some of the comments aloud while the woman and the youth competed at how ostentatiously they could ignore him. On the boxes he chose, none of the sources The Face, For Him, Q, Empire, Blitz -had a name worth eleven. Of course it didn’t matter, though he told himself playfully that he would buy anything which quoted a review from the Telegraph.

Two hours later, when the last shelf brought him back to the cash-desk, he’d found none. The trolley was piled high, mostly with discounted tapes. The youth, who had taken over at the desk while the woman conversed in a back room with two broad men in pinstriped suits, gave the trolley an unwelcoming glance and pulled a pad of receipts towards him. “Name,” he said.

“Jack Orchard. Fine Films.”

“Jack …”

“Orchard.”

The youth wrote “Awchard’ with such industriousness that Jack didn’t like to contradict him. “Fine,” Jack said, “Films,” and was already beginning to have had enough. “Do you think we should wait for your mother?”

The youth raised his head but not his gaze. “She won’t be out till next year.”

“Surely Jack blurted, and realised his blunder. “I meant, no, you carry on. With good behaviour,” he babbled, and succeeded in sneezing so as to interrupt himself.

He made another tour of the shelves while the youth slowly and inventively misspelled the titles of the films. One of the pinstriped men, who Jack had assumed were officials of some kind, frowned at him and closed the door of the back room as Jack glimpsed a bank of at least a dozen video-recorders in operation and a pile of cassettes in unmarked boxes which the other man was loading into a carton. Jack feigned interest in the shelves furthest from the room, though they held comedies featuring teenagers so vacuous he could imagine wishing a serial murderer on them, until the youth at the desk began to sum up the purchases with a calculator. Jack returned to the desk in time to watch him writing the total at the foot of the receipt. “Actually, I think you may have miscalculated,” Jack said. “You might want to tot them up again.”

The youth held up the calculator like a magician displaying a card. “I see what it says, but it’s wrong,” Jack assured him. “Did you enter some amounts more than once, do you think?”

The youth craned his head back towards the inner room, protruding his Adam’s apple at Jack. “Mrs. Vickers,” he shouted at the ceiling.

The woman waddled to the desk, demanding “Aren’t you done yet?” As she peered at the receipt she must have noticed Jack’s address, because she told him “There’s an auction by you.”

“It’s been there for years.”

She stared at him. “Five hundred used titles.”

“Video, you mean? I may have a look. Just now we’ve a disagreement over thirty-nine pounds or so.”

She glanced at the foot of the receipt and then at the figures in the window of the calculator. “I know they tally,” Jack protested, but she had already cleared the window and was stabbing at the keys with one stubby finger. When she’d finished she shook the calculator at him. “Will that do you?”

“If it’s right it will.” Since she hadn’t stopped waving the calculator, the blurring of the digits made him feel as though his fever had revived. “That seems more like it,” he admitted, having managed to distinguish the total, and took out his credit card.

“Marvellous. You’ll have to phone for authorisation,” she told the youth, and stumped into the back room, slamming the door.

The youth read the number on a grubby scrap of paper taped to the desk and prodded digits on the telephone. This part of the ritual of using a credit card always made Jack feel absurdly guilty, and so he gave the youth a grin which was meant to seem resigned but which came out conspiratorial and fixed. By the time the youth read out Jack’s card number and the amount of the purchase, the expression had begun to tweak Jack’s face. He was wondering how to move it when the youth did so for him. In a bored aggrieved tone he said “You’ve got no money left.”

That can’t be right. We’re a thousand in credit at least, more like fifteen hundred. More than we ever use. Don’t put the Jack began to shout, but the youth had dropped the receiver into its house.

The door of the inner room banged open, and the woman barged out, followed by the pinstripes. “What’s the row?” she demanded.

“I wanted to speak to whatever you call them, the authoriser. They’ve got me in the red.”

“What, someone else’s mistaken?” The woman planted her hands on her hips. “Paying cash then, are you?”

“I can’t just now. I haven’t got it,” Jack said, trying to comprehend what had happened. “Can I phone my wife?”

The woman gestured at the desk, and Jack was reaching for the phone when he realised she was indicating the superscription on the taped scrap of cardboard: NO PRIVET PHONE CALLS. “Hedging your profits?” he said wildly. “Then I don’t know what to do.”

“Stop wasting Mrs. Vickers’ time,” the brawnier of the pinstriped team suggested.

“I was here on legitimate business, I assure you.” That must sound like a sly comment on the transactions in the back room, because the two men opened and closed their mouths like fish. “I must say you do business like nobody else I’ve met,” Jack told the woman and the youth, and dodged out of the warehouse.

He hauled himself up into the van and drove into the centre of Liverpool. Could Julia have been so infected by his optimism that she’d spent all that money? The only purchase he could think of that might cost so much was their holiday, but surely she would have mentioned that she was booking it. Had she meant to surprise him? The downtown streets were crowded, streams of people spilling into the roadways whenever a gap developed in the traffic. “Run or die,” Jack growled at them, tramping on the brake.

The entire population of the business district appeared to be on the streets. A ripple of sunlight flashed into his eyes from the river as he turned along the street where Julia worked. There was room for the van outside Rankin’s, by a hooded parking meter. Jack parked hastily, scraping a tyre against the kerb, and ran into the office, calling “Julia.”

She and Lynne, one of the typists, were at the computer, watching columns of figures pour down the screen. “Just a minute,” Julia said, and was at least that long before she turned to him. “Going to buy me lunch?”

“What with? Where’s all the money gone this month? I just tried to buy some stock and they wouldn’t honour the card.”

“I haven’t used mine since Saturday. I certainly haven’t spent more than usual.”

“I told them it was a mistake. What’s the customer relations number?” He was rummaging in his wallet when Lynne said rather smugly “If that’s your van outside, it’s being booked.”

Jack dashed outside as the traffic warden began to write in her notebook. “I’m off, I’m going,” he babbled. “Had to see my wife urgently. Money trouble.”

She pushed her peaked cap higher on her lined forehead with her pen. “Your private life is no concern of mine, sir. I’ll be back this way in five minutes.”